For the same reason, we screened a series of rough cuts to a wide variety of audiences.  To call them ‘focus groups’ would be to lend too much of a scientific gloss to the process.  But we did make an effort to broaden the ideological/methodological spectrum as much as possible, with screenings that ranged from a gathering of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists to Lt. Colonels from the Army War College’s Eisenhower Project.; unsurprisingly, the academics often told us we needed more academics in the film, and the military wanted more military.   We certainly developed thicker skins at the rough-cut screenings.   But we also incorporated many of the criticisms into the final edit.

With Afghanistan in the headlines and talk shows again, I decided to treat this week’s screenings, first at the Naval Post Graduate School at Monterey and then at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, as a kind of road test, to see if we got the balance right.   The screenings were very different in scope and size. In Monterey, the large auditorium was filled with soldiers, Marines, and airmen; in rank, they were Captains and up; almost all of them had experienced multiple rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Several had been in or patrolled with Human Terrain teams.

At Stanford, the setting was more intimate, a large seminar, filled with security experts, historians and social scientists but also sprinkled with budding filmmakers from Stanford’s great documentary program.  There was also a former Human Terrain member as well as commander from Camp Salerno, the forward operating base in Khost where Michael Bhatia had been stationed.   My host was, Norman Naimark, a leading historian of occupation and genocide, whom I’d gotten to know during last year’s stay at the American Academy in Berlin. My discussant was Joseph Felter, a postdoctoral fellow, formerly a Colonel in the Special Forces and head of the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team (CAAT) in Afghanistan that reported  directly to Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus.

The Q and A was very, very good.  Just about every comment, every question came with a deep body of knowledge and experience behind it:  that is, except the first one at the Naval PostGrad School (I was informed later that it was from a Navy ‘snake-eater’) and the first criticism offered by my discussant at Stanford.  I suspect the comments emanated from having one too many academics look down their noses on the military:  how could the academic critics in the film (and by extension, academic filmmakers like myself) possibly understand what they were trying to accomplish if they have not walked in the soldier’s shoes?  I’ve been hit by this one before; indeed, after presenting a paper highly critical of the Iraq War (on day three of the invasion) at the Triangle International Security Studies program in Durham, NC, one of the thirty officers attending from the nearby Fort Bragg Special Operations School attempted to refute my analysis by demanding whether I’d ever gone to boot camp.  My response, admittedly a bit flip – ‘I’d never been to the moon either but I know that it’s not made of blue cheese’  – elicited a physical threat from a guy who appeared to the have the necessary skill-set.  I’d learned my lesson.  This time I tried sweet reason, saying detachment, not identification (as one witnessed too often with embeds), was a better road to the truth.  It seemed to work, because the questions and comments that followed were much less confrontational, much more reflective, about how and why Human Terrain got it right or got it wrong.

Interestingly, when I conducted an informal poll at the end of the session – was the film too pro-, too anti- or fair in its appraisal of Human Terrain? – the Naval Postgrad crowd overwhelmingly went for fair, while the more academic crowd at Stanford was more evenly split.  Go figure.

Millerton Moviehouse

Several emails and six months later I was driving through a beautiful stretch of the Berkshires en route to the Millerton Moviehouse, run by a dedicated husband-and-wife team, Steve and Carol Sadlon, who had bought a former Grange Hall, turned porn film house, into a fully digitized, first-rate, first-run cinema with thrsee good-sized theatre –in a town of 900 souls. I was amazed to see so many folks show up for the Sunday 11.30 AM screening (moved back from the usual 11 because the local clergy had complained about empty pews).  The main theater upstairs filled up quickly with the Salisbury crowd, and the downstairs one was opened up to accommodate some local families that showed up late.

I had decided on the drive down to try a different intro, not to say what the film was – or was not – ‘about’, but to address what Michael Bhatia asks in the opening minutes of the film: ‘What’s the “why”?’  Just what was the ‘why’ behind Human Terrain the program, but also Human Terrain the movie?  Origins are always dubious, subject to the allure of ‘presentism’, in which the past logically and neatly adds up to the moment at hand.  I wanted to highlight the function played by accidents, coincidences, unforeseen tragedies, and yes, synchronicities, that made not just the history of the Human Terrain program but also the making of Human Terrain so different a film than what Michael, David, and I had first envisioned.

I re-counted that first moment, when I thought there might be a film here.  In March 2005, I had been invited to ‘Defense:  Models/Strategies/Media’, a crit-lit conference at UC-Irvine, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to investigate an effort by the Marines to apply lessons after the insurgency went full-bore in the streets of Fallujah.  At a time when the Human Terrain System was still only a gleam in the eye of Montgomery McFate and Steve Fondacaro, the Marine’s War Fighting Laboratory had already taken over an abandoned part of the March Air Reserve Base outside of Riverside, California, filled a couple of trailers with desks and Soviet-style armaments, imported a handful of Iraqi-Americans from LA to play bad guys, draped some female Marines in green sheets (‘burkas’), and produced a laundry-list of bad stuff to rain down on Marines who were there in prep for deployment.

The guy in charge, (then) Major Patrick Kline, who would go on to become director of the Urban Warfare Training program at Twentynine Palms, said he’d take me through the exercise. From dawn (literally) to dusk (figuratively), I was able to observe and shoot with my trusty Panasonic EZ50 eighteen different scenarios, ranging from IED’s to suicide bombers to mortar attacks to abductions.  That night I went back to my motel, physically spent but psychically juiced by what I had seen; using the much-maligned iMovie, I edited it down to a 15-minute clip that I screened the next day at the Irvine conference.  The reaction, dare I say ‘shock and awe’, of that hard-to-please audience convinced me there was something happening here.  I decided to follow-up on Kline’s invitation to come see what they would soon be cooking up in the Mojave Desert.

JDD and Dylan

Back at the Moviehouse, after one of the best Q & A’s ever (capped by an intervention by a Navy Lt. Commander who took me and the crowd to task for failing to support the war effort), we spilled out into the lobby of the Moviehouse, which doubled as an art gallery.  It was then that I fully appreciated the photographs on the walls:  they were of the young Bob Dylan, taken by the remarkable Don Hunstein who now lived just down the road, and at 83, was in the mid-stage of Altzheimers.   Back in the ‘60s he had been the official photographer and designer for Columbia Records, where he took the iconic images of Dylan that would grace his first album covers.   One photo stopped me short: Dylan in Ray-Bans, tight black suit, white button-down shirt, and pointy boots, face uplifted to sing into a boom mic.  What caught my eye were the guitars.  There were two acoustics, one was lying on the ground and the other propped up on the wall.  He was playing a Fender.  It was 1965. Dylan goes electric.

Don Hunstein

After a short, friendly negotiation, I swapped my honorarium for the photo.  Hustling home to make the Oscars, I put on the CD from the live 1966 Manchester concert, where after an acoustic set Dylan straps on an electric guitar.  A guy in the audience cries out ‘Judas!’  Dylan retorts ‘I don’t believe you – You’re a liar’.  And then, barely audible (he must have turned his back to the mic), you can hear him say to the band (not yet ‘The Band’ but the Hawks):  ‘Play it fuckin’ loud.’  Which they did -  ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ – and I did, bringing it all back home.

You can read the review here.